Jeff Russell

1) Thanks much for this; your boast's being well-fulfilled. I don't think my part in the comments will be as long as the previous discussion: I'm far from starting from 0 about JBP on the one hand, and on the other have less related knowledge that might allow me to add something. That said, I do expect it to help me when I begin Maps of Meaning, and I'll be sure to point it out to anyone that seems interested in but ignorant about JBP.

Fair enough - this was at least as much for me sorting out how to process things as it was to a helpful guide to others.

2) "deketemoisant" - You keep using that name; I don't think it means whom you think it means.

D'oh! Yeah, I see the vowel I got wrong there. My apologies.

3) "And so I set out, modestly, to try to more clearly set out the thinking of someone who has made himself known worldwide and rather wealthy by explaining things." - Nice! How Scott-Alexander-influenced do you think that was?

Heh, a lot to very?

4) "our perception of the world, at a very fundamental level, is sorted into stuff that we treat as pretty much settled (Order), stuff that hasn't been explored and could be anything (Chaos)" - I do wonder about who that "we" is - I think there are explainable reasons for the East Asia to relatively resemble Europe, but I wonder that the quote may be less true for many other peoples (including Indians despite them all being linguistically Indo-European or Indo-European-influenced nowadays: see "nondualism" (I do know it was far from universal in India, but it's been long substantial)).

Peterson tries to link this to some pretty fundamental neuroscience, but unsurprisingly, the experiments extablishing that neuroscience are all with Europeans or American undergrads. So yeah, it's really hard to tell how much is culturally determined, and how much not.

5) "That being said, our history being what it is, most stories have been about dudes, so the Mediator is usually depicted as a guy, with some flavoring of symbolic masculinity." - The *only* father/mother/daughter trinity I can recall is the Etruscan/Capitoline Triad - do you remember any other?

I can't think of any others. There are some other examples of female characters playing a big part in myth (most myths about Freyja, Idhunna, to some degree Athena, and maybe some others), but I think it's non-controversial to point out that most stories for most cultures have been about men, and the stories about women have been more "supplemental".

6) "folks like Jung and Peterson argue that to be a fully-developed, healthy person, you need to be comfortable with both, and integrate both wholly into your personality." - BTW, do you recall a good writing/speech by JBP about how he integrated whatever femininity he did?

Unfortunately, no, I don't have a specific speech to cite. He talks in more than one place about the imporance of integrating the Anima, but I can't think of anywhere specific where he describes his Anima.

7) "the Moon a macho man." - I was aware of Máni being male, but do you say he was depicted as unusually masculine? If so, I have no idea about that!

Not "unusually" masculine, more just "all the stuff this culture assumes about a man".

8) "in a good story, the Hero and the Villain do have much in common." - More so if the protagonist isn't morally perfect (as must have been the case at least in the actual facts), and the antagonist is more "irreconciliably opposed" than "evil" (as does happen in great myth); in the best cases, there may even be basis for reasonable disagreement over whether the protagonist was actually on the better side. Also, "who's wrong", as the War Nerd likes to say, can change a lot depending on where you start telling (sure, more relevant for history than myth, but I think there's myth that actually shows some of that - Iliad/Mahabharata/Shahnameh?).

Yeah, definitely. I think a lot of Indo-European myth is actually weirdly supportive of the idea of nuance in both what goes right and what goes wrong.

9) "And the hyenas are then Bad Chaos (though interestingly, put to work on behalf of Bad Order)." - If one accepts the comment I made at https://jprussell.dreamwidth.org/2951.html about the ancient European worldview being about Order productively controlling Chaos, it's no surprise - and Good Order would be good *because* it controls (Good?) Chaos. (Hm, perhaps one could talk about splitting a singular Chaos to destroy (to the extent possible!) the Bad and absorb the Good?)

Yeah, interesting. The thought that "controlled Chaos" is most likely good, if put to the right ends, is an interesting one.

10) "He also shows alternation between how much Chaos and how much Order he represents" - Seems a basic requirement of a Good Mediator, no?

Yeah, almost by definition - getting the balance right, which varies by situation.

11) "Magician/Wise Old Man" - At least the latter seems to often be a former Good Mediator - in some stories, he's explicitly a former [something similar to the protgonist] with some clear reason why he can't do what the protagonist can despite having done something fairly similar in the past. (I may need to read more about Krishna, who IIRC is an example with plenty of stories at both stages - of course all those stories weren't originally about a single entity!)

That's an interesting thought, and one that makes a lot of sense - the reason you'd know what guidance to give is that you've been there!